{"product_id":"9781429944601","title":"I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir","description":"\u003cp\u003eSome time ago Rafi Zabor sat down to write a brief narrative of the year 1986. That was the year he set out across two continents in a used Mercedes--\"Wabenzi\" is the Swahili word for a member of the Mercedes-owning class--to buy a grave stone for his friend Mahmoud Rauf and to outrun the shadow of his own parents' recent death.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut like a boat against the current, the writer was drawn back into the past: his father's escape from the Nazis, Rafi's own Brooklyn boyhood surrounded by the fractious, Zabors and Zaborovskys, and the anguished--sometimes farcical--spiritual journey that led Zabor from Brooklyn to Turkey by way of Coltrane, the thirteenth-century mystic Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, the McGovern campaign, Gurdjieff, a shoe salesman named Gogol, and the cataclysmic months Zabor spent studying (and whirling) amid a band of Sufis in rural England. The result--the first of a projected four volumes--is one of the most original, capacious, and vivid narratives of the last few decades, a real-life Bildungsroman dealing with an expanded range of human experience, from matters of life and death to a piece of what lies beyond them. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStraight from the unchartered territory between \u003ci\u003eZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eTristram Shandy\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eI, Wabenzi\u003c\/i\u003e lifts a corner of the known world as if it were the edge of a curtain, and begins to show a reality new to our literature gleaming on the other side.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Farrar, Straus and Giroux","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47139277766896,"sku":"9781429944601","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781429944601_p0.jpg?v=1769902571","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781429944601","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}